Internet Explorer 10 for Windows 7 Coming Soon

IE 10 for Windows 8 has been out for months and there’s a preview version available for Windows 7, but so far Microsoft has not officially released an IE upgrade for Windows 7 users.

That’s likely to change in the very near future given that the company has released an IE 10 Automatic Update Blocker Toolkit for businesses and organizations that don’t want to upgrade to IE 10. Naturally the only reason you’d need to block IE 10 is if it is in fact finally coming to Windows 7.

There’s a second piece of good news for web developers in this announcement, namely that Microsoft is planning to automatically upgrade IE 9 users to the much more web standards-friendly IE 10 (except of course for those users who download the newly released blocking toolkit).

While IE 10 is a fine web browser, Microsoft’s track record for getting customers to actually update to the latest versions of its software is, well, terrible. And that’s the real problem most developers have with IE 10: It’s not that it isn’t a good browser with impressive support for web standards, what worries web developers is that there’s always the chance that it will be left to rot for 10 years like IE 6.

Hopefully, given Microsoft’s push to automatically upgrade Windows 7 users to the latest IE release, that won’t be the case.